Charlie Haden, the great American bassist and bandleader, died in 2014 before finishing this final album by his Liberation Music Orchestra – the majestic, politically inspired big band he founded with Carla Bley in 1969. These five pieces (with Haden playing on two, and his bass deputy Steve Swallow on the others) include the classic Miles Davis/Bill Evans ballad Blue in Green – featuring a typically spare and throbbing Haden solo and gorgeous tenor sax playing from Tony Malaby and Chris Cheek – and Carla Bley’s slow-burn throwback to earlier Liberation Music days in the march-time snare-drum beat of the title track. Bley’s Silent Spring glides on a darkly brooding two-chord hook, her famous Utviklingssang moves with its familiarly stately reproach, and Haden’s Song for the Whales joins abstract whale-song sounds from his bowed bass as part of a fast, free-jazz whale hunt, ending with his own guilelessly moving words on the preciousness of all life.
• Carla Bley and the orchestra play the EFG London jazz festival on 20 November.
